Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Good news

After my visit to London and the M&B Centenary party, I said that I'd had some good news but I wasn't yet able to announce if definitely.

Well, yesterday, I got the confirmation that it's going ahead so now I can tell you all about it - and I'm so thrilled about this!

The covers scattered about this post should give you the clues to what I'm talking about - and that is that all three books in The Alcolar Family trilogy are going to be reprinted as a collection in the By Request series. The collection will be in the shops in August this year.

For those of you who don't know about The Alcolar Family or missed it the first time around, the Alcolars are two brothers, (well - half brothers - they have the same father - Juan Alcolar - but different mothers) and a sister, from a complicated aristocratic Spanish family and each book tells the story of one of them and their personal journey to their happy ever after.

The Alcolar Family first started out as an internet short story calledWife For Realwhich was about yet another brother (I warned you that this family was complicated!) Alex, who was the illegitimate son of Juan Alcolar. At the end of that story I introduced the rest of Alex's family - his father and his two half-brothers, Joaquin and Ramon, and his half-sister Mercedes who, at that point had just walk on parts. But the story was very popular, and in the comments on eHarlequin lots of readers asked about the other members of the family. Was I going to write a story for Joaquin, Ramon and Mercedes, they wanted to know.

I already had ideas for the rest of the family. I knew about Juan's past history - of his four children, only two were by the same woman, his wife, the other two were the result of affairs - and so each of them was affected in their own way by the past and their own place in the family. I discussed the idea with my editor, she was as excited by it as I was - and so The Alcolar Family trilogy was born.

Joaquin is the eldest and only legitimate son and his story is told in The Twelve Month Mistress. Believing himself to be very much his father's son, he has stuck strictly to his 'no commitment' rule for years, but now he's met the woman he just can't walk away from.

Next, in The Spaniard's Inconvenient Wife, is Ramon, the son who grew up believing that another man was in fact his father. But now that he knows he's an Alcolar he's determined to establish his place in the family. As part of this plan, he determines on a carefully planned marriage of convenience - only to find that he's got more than he's bargained for in his choice of a wife.

And finally there's Mercedes, the only daughter. In Bound By Blackmail she is swept off her feet by sexy Jake Taverner, a man she meets on a trip to London. But Mercedes doesn't know that Jake is also a member of a family that has strong reasons to hate the Alcolars and all that they stand for. When he traps her into a fake engagment she has no idea if his skillful seduction is genunine or part of the long-standing feud between his family and hers.

The original books came out in 2004/2005 and they were a great success in both the UK and USA. The first two books -Joaquin's story, and Ramon's have both appeared in the list of Favourite Kate Walker titles when I ran the poll both in 2004 and last year - when Bound By Blackmail also appeared on it. There has also been a lot of rivalry between readers who claim Joaquin as their favourite Alcolar and those who say that Ramon is the one for them. And of course, because of a certain - er 'knicker scene' - India Grey will always claim that Bound By Blackmail contains her favourite Kate Walker 'golden moment' as she explained in her post in the Great Big Blog Party last year.

One of the reasons I'm so thrilled about this collection reprint is that I keep getting emails from readers who have read one or other of The Alcolar Family titles and are now looking for the rest of them and haven't been able find them. At least in August they will have a chance to get the complete trilogy all in one volume. The only disappointment is that the internet short story won;t be in it - but that is still available as an on-line read on the Mills and Boon site or as a Harlequin Mini ebook at eharlequin.com . It was also published in print form in the 2008 Mills and Boon Annual and there are still some copies of that available on Amazon.co.uk

August is also the month when my novella The Duke's Secret Wife (originally published in Society Weddings) is reprinted as part of the Mills & Boon 100th Birthday Collection. (you can buy the whole collection here if you can't wait to collect them through the year. This offer will save you over £12 on the complete set)

So August will be reprint month for me. I don't have the covers for The Alcolar Family or The Duke's Secret Wife to show you yet, but just as soon as I get them you know I'll share them with you.